Bedlam
by PHLover213
Summary: "Once upon a time, there was a pretty young girl. This girl was given every opportunity imaginable and she was happy." This story is dark, twisted, and unlike anything I've written before. Kind of an odd style. Eventual ExC, AU, T for violence.
1. Chapter 1

Once upon a time, there was a pretty young girl. This girl was given every opportunity imaginable and she had two best friends. She was happy. As she grew up, her life was wonderful, and she was taught the violin and the piano. Her Mama and Papa loved the music that the girl could create. Their home was always full of life and music and love.

The first thing to change was the girl's Mama. The girl never understood why she left. All she knew was that Mama was gone, and her Papa was never the same.

Her two best friends slowly drifted. The music became quiet and sinister. All the life disappeared from the girl's erstwhile happy existence. And one day, when the girl was entering upon her seventeenth year, she returned home from the market to see the most horrible thing in the world. But the smell was first. The smell of alcohol and bile attacked her and the girl's throat constricted. She walked to the lounge room and there lay her Papa's body, with a smashed bottle on the ground next to him. His eyes—they were once so fiery and alive—were now glassy and dead. Tears ran down the pale face of the shuddering girl. It was with horror that she realised her fairytale childhood was gone, and she was utterly and entirely alone.

**xxxx**

Never in my twenty three years in the study of the insane had I seen such a heartbreaking case. The girl was just barely seventeen—and she had been painfully, delicately beautiful. There was a portrait of her on my desk. Defined cheekbones, a thin nose, soft cheeks and, at the time the portrait was made, she had glowing eyes. But when she'd arrived her hair was matted and unkempt and her face was dirty. She had already been crushed by the events that led her to the asylum, like a flower under a careless workman's boot. She would not, _could_ not survive in an asylum such as this without proper care, and God knew she would not be taken in somewhere else.

"Doctor Khan?" a husky voice broke me from my reverie.

"Yes?" I snapped at the matronly nurse who stood in my office doorway, brawny arms crossed over her heaving chest.

"Well, guv, the doctor was to perform the lobotomy on . . . on . . . '_im_. . . 'e's bin found dead in 'is quarters."

I rose suddenly and perhaps too violently from my sear. The lobotomy victim—I mean _patient_—was an incredibly eccentric man in my asylum. The loss of his brilliant mind was an unfortunate but necessary measure; he was a serial murderer who always butchered his victims _after_ murdering them through other means. I gave him certain allowances because of my fascination with him—my wife called it an infatuation. He was to be referred to as "sir" even by the staff, and he was allowed to wear a stiff satin mask at all times; nobody was to touch it or refer o it, no matter what. All of my staff and most of my patients were afraid of him. Apparently it was with good reason too.

**xxxx**

Easily done. Cyanide in the bad doctor's morning tea. It is amusing, imagining the realisation dawning on the bad doctor's face. He is going to see it in a moment, anyway, when he comes back to spill blood. Cut, cut, blood, blood, ha, ha, ha! There is beauty even in murder and mutilation, in death and destruction, insanity and isolation . . .

The bad doctor was going to take away his mind, his one sanctuary. Tsk, tsk! He can't allow that. In his mind he is faceless and he can unlock the doors of the asylum—_no, no,_ the doors of the prison—and the streets run with the blood of his vengeance. Beautiful, beautiful, shining, glistening, glittering scarlet. And he will run, when it is done, and hide from prying eyes forever.

The murder of the bad doctor, the consequences that may come—_shock treatment, sharp tendrils raking his soul_—later are worth it. He stays safe within the confines of his free and as yet unhindered brain.

**xxxx**

The girl was suddenly cast adrift on a grey, tumultuous ocean. Without Papa, without a mere echo of the past to keep her sanity intact. Three days she stayed in her house with the thing—the body, which she could not bring herself to apply her Papa's identity to—the thing, watching the flesh slowly bloat and decay. It was hideous.

There was a smell that she refused to do a thing about. It was either her Papa's rotten stench or the smell of the meat that she did not put in the icebox when she returned from the market. The oozing liquid around his mouth had gone crusty and the trickle of blood on the floor was a rusty, sick brown. The sight made the girl want to sob, so painful was it in its horror.

When the men in white suits came for her, the girl had not the strength to make a single protest. she was disconnected, she was ten years old on a hillside with her Mama and her Papa and her two best friends, playing an ancient French lullaby—old as the hill they stood on—and the girl was so far away, so absorbed in the dreamlike golden light in her mind that she did not feel the brightly glinting silver needle sliding into her milk white arm.

**xxxx**

I gave a sigh as I came to the dead doctor's room—the murderer had a flair for the bizarre and the gruesome, that much was obvious simply from looking around. He was a showman, though he had one little idiosyncrasy that I found inexplicable. In every case of butchery, he left his victim's face completely untouched, though more often than not the rest of the body was mutilated beyond recognition. Such was the case here—the last horrific scream was still frozen on the dead man's face.

I noticed with only a small degree of surprise that there was a note scrawled in blood on the wall.

"Dr Khan," (it ran, in a messy and childish script) "As you see, I allowed myself some fun with the man who was going to steal my brain away. Unfortunately, I've also used your last store of cyanide. Many apologies for the mess."

I refused to reciprocate the camaraderie that the madman insisted we shared. In his twisted, dark mind, we were the only two above the pale of madness within the asylum. Funny, considering the cold, clinical attitude he had towards butchering fellow humans.

I shook my head and a frown etched itself across my face. It appeared I would have to pay my friend a little visit.

**xxxx**

**Whoa, okay.**

**So, for one thing, I think my muse for **_**every other fanfiction I have ever written**_** has jumped off a cliff. So for now I'm sticking with this one, which struck me earlier today. I've had a day off and not been in the best of moods, so I decided to write about a psychopath.**

**It's been a while, everyone, do tell me what your opinion of this freak show is.**

**See you next time, etc.**


	2. Chapter 2

The girl wakes in a cold, silent room. The mattress is stuffed with itchy straw and her fine clothes have been taken and replaced with a shapeless, rough—it feels like burlap—nightgown. She curls her knees up to her body and squeezes her eyes shut. This must be the worst nightmare she's ever had. It even lacks the dreamlike, unreal quality that used to make her childhood nightmares, back when things were good, when life was happy, bearable. Now the nightmare is starkly realistic and for days, it's all she can do to sit there and not tear her hair out. Occasionally an attendant places food on the floor by her bed. The silence threatens to stifle her—and perhaps the silence is the worst part. There is no music here, not even the sinister, discordant lullabies the girl conjured up when Mummy left. Just horrible, empty, mind-numbing silence.

And perhaps she could sing. Once or twice, in fact, she wets her lips and waits for a song, or even a solitary note, to come to her, but all that ever comes out is a choked breath and then she usually just . . . cries. But all too soon, the tears run out, and all that is left is tearing at her once beautiful hair. But here there is no bathing. Only days and days of isolation. And it's on what the girl thinks is the fifth day that he comes. A doctor with deep brown skin and kind eyes. She sits up. He closes the door but stands with his back against it as if she is an animal that might attack him at any second. And that's when it begins to hit her—she's a madwoman now. Nobody will listen to her; nobody will sympathise with her. Her life is all but ruined. All of her prospects are gone.

"Please let me go."

The doctor sighs as if he is a hundred years old and rubs his temples. "I'm sorry, miss, but that's quite impossible, under the circumstances."

"I'm not mad!" the girl exclaims, suddenly seized with fury. She leaps up from her place on the bed and begins pacing back and forth. "I'm sane as anyone! It's not . . ." she runs her hands through her hair. "Her Mummy and Daddy left! You can't blame her!"

The doctor gives her an odd look. "To be honest, miss, I do not blame you at all. Were I in a similar position, I would probably end up in here too. I'm sorry. Truly I am."

She flops back down on the bed and stretches out. "I shan't speak again until I am thanking you for permission to leave this horrible place, _sir!_" she spits, and doesn't speak again. Everyone in the world thinks she's completely insane. And all she's done is watch her papa rot. Is that a crime? What was she supposed to do? Clean up his mess?

As the doctor leaves, she curses under her breath.

**xxxx**

The madman was standing right outside the girl's room as I withdrew and I jumped.

"You really must stop that." I said angrily, straightening my jacket and continuing on my rounds. "It does not do for a doctor to be frightened as he walks the corridors of an insane asylum."

"Indeed it does not! Am I really so frightening, doctor?" he chuckled to himself. His laugh was perhaps the most menacing thing I had ever heard among the cries and the rants of the insane.

"You have a way about you." I replied tiredly, glancing at my papers. "Please go back to your room. I don't particularly care to discover how or why you got out in the first place."

"You may need a new attendant for me. The current chap seems to have broken his wrist and suffered a few deep lacerations to the face. God knows why."

I rolled my eyes. "If you don't respect this institution, I am afraid I will have to strap you down and perform that lobotomy myself."

I was against the wall before I could register what was happening. The masked face was mere centimetres from my own and the scruff of my collar was clenched so tightly within his pale fist that it almost choked me. "You do not have the strength, old man. And it would be such a shame to have to kill you, given all the trouble you've gone to keeping yourself alive."

I didn't reply.

With a snarl, he let go of me and stalked off down the hallway. I readjusted my clothing yet again and sighed as I returned to my office. It had been quite a long day, but at least that night I would be able to go home.

When I arrived, my wife was tutting about my lateness and only when we sat down to dinner with our daughter did she ask me, "How was your day, my love?"

And I sipped my wine before answering. "My masked friend tried to kill me."

"Nadir!" she gasped and seemed very flustered, and suddenly I felt bad about upsetting her. "Why did you choose this field?"

"To be fair, Mother, he chose it before he chose you." said my daughter quietly. She shot me a smile. "I'm sure it was at the least _interesting_, Father."

My wife fixed her with a glare. I chuckled.

"There's never a dull moment with that man, my dear, that is certain."

Though if I was honest, it made me feel unwell to think that at that moment the young, innocent girl who had recently entered my charge and that psychopath were in the same building. After all, he'd been outside her room as I'd left it. Did he suspect there was a new plaything waiting in there for his manipulation?

Try as I might to distract myself with reading and a generous glass of whisky, the thought of that innocent girl helpless at the hands of that masked fiend would not leave me. I hastened to bed that night in the hope that I would rise earlier than normal and get to the asylum in time to remove the callousness and the sick imagination of my psychopathic friend by force.

**xxxx**

The girl is in a half-asleep, half-awake trance. Sometimes, back at home, in this state, she would hallucinate dazzling colours and sweet melodies. She would hallucinate the picnic on the hill.

But it is tonight that the divine music comes. There's a voice. A strange, deep, sensual voice that simultaneously lulls and excites. She doesn't dare to open her eyes, lest the music and the voice disappear. It is so beautiful that tears well up in her eyes. She buries her face in her pillow and sobs. The silence is gone.

But surely this is too beautiful to be real. Her mind is playing tricks on her. Oh, that is very cruel! She sits up and opens her eyes wide.

_The music doesn't stop._

**xxxx**

**My, my, how I've missed writing for Phantom. This has been bugging me all day, and as I write this it's seventeen minutes to one in the morning.**

**Basically, I've been busy.**

**Though I must say briefly that I had the absolute pleasure of being able to see LND Australia twice. And it exceeded my expectations like you would not believe. They've even slipped in a nod to Leroux and several references and musical motifs from PotO. Not to mention that the acting and singing are **_**spectacular.**_** There's a bit where the Phantom just stands at the back of the stage and looks menacing for a few minutes, and the second time I went I swear he was glaring at me.**

**It's a fabulous show, and should you get the chance to see a recording, absolutely don't refuse.**

**Okay, I'm going to go to sleep.**

**Reviews, pretty please?**


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